SPEAKER_01 0:38

Man. AI will always be our wingman. I think where I want I want to caution my team to be focused on is it should not become it can become your brain sparring partner, but it can't become your thinker. You know, and therefore when you you heard this few words earlier in content, it came out as AI slop. Now you can use AI slop interestingly as a creative team, but you don't want to create it without making it create, you know, clutter. Similarly, thinking slop is a very true thing. Because if you are constantly going to just say, I need to build this, think for me, you're not putting in your own thoughts. And that it can never.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Hello marketing champions. Welcome to another episode of the ABM Way. Today I have with me a very special guest. She is the CMO of Pine Labs, one of the major fintech companies in India, one of the largest fintech companies in India. She not just works for Pine Labs, but she has vast experience in other big five companies, including Google. So welcome to the show, Charlie. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Thank you. Thanks for coming. Okay. Now, the first thing I wanted to ask you was you know, a lot of things from your LinkedIn profile stuck in Google, Microsoft, Pine Labs. So being big uh logos. So I'm just trying to understand. You know, everything is in different enterprise motions, and uh you have joined joined new in Pine Labs. So when you walked into Pine Labs, right? Um actually is there any specific thing that you wanted to diagnose in terms of the marketing organization when you started Mew?

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Great question. I think um more than all more than auditing or understanding the marketing organization, for me, actually, it was understanding the business. It is like you said, uh, some of the other companies have been large, right? And they've been technically established from how marketing needs to function. That's what I mean in terms of what it means to be at marketing over here. It was almost over here to look at what I consider it to be understanding the business first and then looking at where we are today and where we're looking at it in the future, right? So when I think of it from that lens, I think for me it's almost like a 5C framework. I mean, I think being married to a consultant, ex-consultant kind of brings back this piece, but think of the fact that you first need to think of the company, right? Where the company is currently. We think about the capabilities that the company wants to move into or is currently building towards. We look at the customer in terms of how the interactions are happening. We look at the competition and then we look at the context. And in that framework, marketing needs to operate, right? So it's not about the marketing organization as much as it's these seeds that we need to take a look at and then navigate uh in terms of what marketing function needs to be. So I think that's what I did looking at the functional capabilities within this framework of context, competition, company capability, and customer.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Nice, nice. So basically, whenever somebody joins you to an organization like this, uh they always have a to-do list for like 45 days, 30 days. I'm not sure most people will be accomplished that or you know, not uh a lot of people complain, no no, I had an ambitious to-do list and then it's gone, or a diagnostic list that's gone. So is that something that you came up with and then is there something you were actually looking forward to actually work on?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Yeah, I mean, I think uh yes, I mean in most cases you typically have this first 60 days, understand the company, understand the people, and you have to do that. But I think the the rhythm or being part of a company that's starting to have at works at such speed. I actually started working on a campaign even before I officially joined the company. So you can imagine whether I really had the first 60 days to kind of think about that. But stepping back, I think one of the key things that we did was understand the people, right? We may be a fintech company, but it's the people behind it that are building out the product. It's the salespeople that are starting to sell that proposition. So I think that was what I wanted to understand and kind of hints back at what I earlier said, which is the company capability and the competition. So that was something I really want to do. So for me, success would be that can I walk into a room and understand exactly what that salesperson or that product person is talking about? Because the moment you understand that marketing's job is actually to translate that and make that understandable or make it visible. So for me to get that translation logic was extremely important. So that I thought was my 30, 60-day plan. But in addition to that, this was a company that has been a company of many companies, right? We have acquired multiple companies, and every company has its own ethos, its own belief system, its own ambitions and objectives. And then to try and see how we could take away some of those silos and try and bring it into a shared pool of capability was something that was interesting. And so that kind of led to something that we've been creating as a new structure of marketing, which is where we get these centers of excellence that are pooled resources across the organization that start working on specific and specialist kind of driven capabilities, but supported very ably with business and the product marketing teams that interface with the product and business teams. Now, this is a structure I've seen work at parts in Microsoft, and I kind of took and I saw that scalability to being able to something that we could also scale over here. So that I think was a shift, lift, and operate kind of a thing that I did over here. But increasingly, what it also did as a capability was started getting many people who had never worked on other brands, you know. So in the past, you would had one art or one copy person working on one business unit. That ended up restricting how they were thinking. The moment we started doing the old structure, immediately people that were not working on online commerce but working on affordability were able to connect the dots between how commerce is moving across, right? And what can decision makers be there. It became challenging. People removed their little buy, oh, I only have to work on this business unit, but then focused on the company at luck. So I think that was another additional benefit that I saw happening in the first 30, 60, 90 days as I was exploring how we should be building as a company and quite happy about seeing how people are excited about the work, they're excited about what they're doing. There is uh energy that I continue to see, and that's what's uh exciting about it.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

So, like say when you were talking about different perspectives, different acquisitions, I have seen a lot, you know, and I've been interacting with the Centro also. So, like this, you have different companies, different verticals. So, Mike, uh I was also curious to know because Pine Labs deals with not just banks, the merchants, enterprises, and different, different buyers. So when it comes to your GTM strategy, you know, is there a way you prioritize room to reach, or is there a common cluster you will form? Or I'm just trying to understand how you are able to manage first different uh segments of your target audience.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

Yeah, I think um, you know, GTM is something that you try and do during the launch period, right? Like, okay, you're launching a product, and then you have the always-on aspect that you're thinking about it. And you also called out that different companies may have different buyer groups, and that's true. Actually, that's true for any B2B tech segment that we have. Uh buyer groups are different. There's also similarity, and when I think about GTM, there's also similarity on how you want to market. So I'll take this question into two parts. Part one is what are the similarities? And then part two is how do I want to kind of focus on this piece, right? So part one, when you think about similarities, and you talked about my career a little bit. Across my career, across B2C and B2B, I do see there is similarity in that marketing. So there's no people typically think if it's B2B, it will be events, direct marketing, CRM. That's the GTM strategy that people will think about, right? But actually, what is true is that there is so much of similarity because the emotional, we think of them being rational, and therefore you'd see a lot of claim-based and testimony. I'm not saying it isn't needed. Of course it's needed because you really need to build trust. But what you do need to realize is that marketing in at a foundational level is now becoming human to human. That's what it is. So it is not B2C, it is not B2B, it's actually human to human. And when you think about that human to human, you then start first actually thinking about what is it that emotional aspects of the product and that customer and the and that context will actually be focused on. So if we get that, then we start to understand. So, for example, when we're thinking about online commerce and we're thinking about payment gateways, yes, it's extremely important to see success of a payment gateway happening. It's very important to see transaction, it's very important to see how we are working across ease of deployment. All of that are product rational benefits. But if I only focused on that, then I'm as good as any other product that would also be wanting to talk about that product differences, right? But stepping back and saying perhaps it's about making sure, not just saying we're scaling, but actually bringing up the product story about how we're helping them scale, right? And making that perhaps the element of focusing on that. So for me, getting that prioritization was extremely important for these products. What is it that we want to talk at a human-to-human level? And then how do we kind of bring that across reasons to believe within our product portfolio itself? So that's something that's extremely critical to do. The other thing that you also try and do when I say human into human, and you also mention buyer groups, that is actually what changes when it comes to B2B and B2C. Because the buyer groups that we see are people that we typically see in a sale. You go into a room and the salesperson is talking, the person across the table is your buyer profile. But actually, there are in a B2B segment, there are multiple other buyers. I can tell you today, if I have to do a marketing campaign, it is equally important for my CFO to be leaned into that strategy as it is for me, right? And that's what I mean by the hidden buyer groups. And therefore, it's equally important to understand even the hidden buyer groups conversations and theirs. So you may talk about great product, but then if you don't think about what it means from a pricing, what it means from an engineering point of view, you're starting to not talk to everyone else at that buyer group. So for me, that was prioritizing the GTM, right? Thinking through each of the buyer segments, thinking through the products and thinking about what this means from a human-to-human point of view. And then the second thing that we noticed, and you kind of brought that up, is different companies are tending to talk to the same customer, right? At that end customer, right? And then therefore, we will still look like five different teams from Pine Labs going and talking to that same customer at the back. So that is something we have to solve for. And this is not just a Pine Labs problem. This is typically any company that may have multiple solutions that may target to that same customer. And how do we do it? So we've actually been thinking a little bit more deeply around this. Uh, would I say that do we have this and do we have this down? No, we don't. But I think there's an approach that we're starting to do, especially with one collective audience. So when we think about the banks as a collective audience and we look at, we look back at all our companies and all our verticals, and we think, can we go with a one solution for them? Right. So I think that's something that's still in the works. I I think it's uh it's something we've identified, but we're hoping if that comes in, then the strength of the combined narrative becomes in. So I think that's how we're looking at doing uh the GTM or the always-on and things like that over there.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Interesting. It's very interesting. And I remember I'm remembering something which or the similar lines which we were also trying to do. Because all this while marketing in B2B or if I keep doing account-based marketing, usually about targeting a specific industry, going behind them and marketing. But consistently, what we figured out more than that, we've done different industries come to a similar or a same pain point for them, form a cluster of accounts based on it. Doesn't matter which industry or the problem statement is the same among all the industries. Correct. Form a cluster of accounts, get that account list and go behind the problem statement rather than going behind just uh industry, this industry, this industry. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, farm that is works very well, and that's exactly what I see. You're also talking about. Yes, interesting, interesting. So uh actually talking about that, I I I'm just remembering there's no conversation without AI. And people don't these days people don't ask, you know, have you started AI? It's about where at what stage are you in AI right now? That's how the conversations are going. So do you think for all this, how was AI helping you? Is that AI making any big difference or something you deliberately want to avoid automatic? I was just like curious to know from you.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Uh so what of course AI is almost like a drinking game when you talk about it. But I've come from two companies that both Google and and Microsoft, right? The the starting off the AI wave itself comes from these companies that is there. So I actually call it my bus, but I do believe AI is here to help and AI is here to stay. I think we are all on a journey of figuring out how it will start to shape up and help. But I don't think it's hype anymore. Increasingly, when I look at how AI is being used as now, not just a person that was, you know, I came from a company that was building it and showing how other companies could use it to now coming over here where we are using it, we're actually building towards it. We see it immediately improve on operation, automation, code support. A lot of that work is already happening, which the engineering teams are starting to do. When I look at my own function, right? I think this is where I think there are two or three places where I would say I would want to use, we're using AI, and some places where I feel not a question of restricting, but what it would do if we start leveraging it. So, where is it starting to help? It's starting to help increasingly as we're thinking about automation of our assets, right? It is increasingly starting to help when we're wanting to bring in volume and variation in our assets. So in languages and the way we want to kind of create these product explainers, user videos that maybe have taken demo videos that are extremely important, extremely important and extremely helpful. Where I feel it is, and actually I actually started off this. Uh, my team has started to do it is that every weekend they actually post on different things that they've used AI as a tool. So, for example, let's take performance marketing. In performance marketing, there are so many rules that we need to kind of think through, right? Is it gonna work? Where's the logo size? How do you kind of create it? So, one of my team members actually created an entire AI-based tool to assess the creative based on the simple use case. It is right. So instead of customized for your components, customized for our thing, right? Because we are building this out. It's got our context, it's got the but it's got the rules of the domain, and then you're able to match these things and build this out and starts happening. Another team member is actually building it out to create, we're thinking through gamified experiences, and they're starting to use that to saying how can I start thinking of prototypes to showcase the idea? Because sometimes what I'm trying to say verbally may not land, right? So they're starting to create these little prototypes because you now with no code, you can actually create what you want as an app or an experience that's starting to happen. Again, an amazing way of getting somebody who's never had a computer engineering background, doesn't need to work with product to build this out, but is able to come into a room and saying, hey, this is what I'd like to build and this is what I would like to do. Uh in can we work on this together and things like that. There's a third team member that's working on bringing out my performance reports. If there's a night, yeah, already the performance reports are automated, but immediately the AI tool is able to kind of quickly kind of summarize this elements of various reports that are starting to come in and to dictate what we can do and what we can improve on on the next one, right? So lots of these things are starting to happen with AI being used internally in our company and in my team itself. And I'm constantly, we're always looking at the next masterclass of learning. When anything gets dropped, we immediately try and should is this really just a demo or is it do we do we, you know, can we see some real thing about it? And it's fabulous, especially as we're thinking through creation. Though when I talk about creation, this is where I would say we need to have a little bit. So it's our wingman. AI will always be our wingman. I think where I want, I want to caution my team to be focused on is it should not become it can become your sparring partner, but it can't become your thinker. You know, and therefore, when you you heard this few words earlier in content, it came out as AI slop. Now you can use AI slop interestingly as a creative team, but you don't want to create it without making it create, you know, clutter. Similarly, thinking slop is a very true thing. Because if you are constantly going to just say, I need to build this, think for me, you're not putting in your own thoughts. And that it can never do. That original thinking needs to be there. In fact, I say every time you write your brief, do not use AI to create your brief because you are limiting what you could have actually thought about and seen. So that's where it is. Where does it come in? In the journey is extremely important. For me, it's important when it comes into the journey of automation or moving it or thinking about an alternate or critique that you may or your blind spot that you may have seen, but not in the origination of thought. The origination and creativity still comes very human line for me.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Exactly, exactly. That's a judgment call that humans need to take. I mean that that's exactly I was actually discussing with my uh marketer, and uh we were saying like any marketing program, you start with small, just do it with human to human. Then for scaling, we can use AR. And he also mentioned when you remember all this. There's a research paper that uh we pointed out and told me that recently for the online scaling, also, all the strategy games are you know mis taken and only fast-paced games are both popular, and then board games are you know, people are promoting both games. So people don't want to sit for strategizing, spend time you know, on that. So then it is something we should look into and start spending more time on that.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

I keep telling, I keep getting worried, you know. I was born without the year I was born. I didn't have a I was not attached to a mobile phone. I read books for for entertainment and you you know, you watch that one uh program in the thing versus what my son is like, he looks at a phone and the last thing he does is actually call somebody. He's always doing something else. That's so yeah, you should not. I I'm very worried that people should not forget how to write original thought.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

And so and I was telling him, you know, I used to play board games in my childhood. And where are these board games these things? You know, not even chess, you know, very few people start playing chess.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

There's a wave of nostalgia now coming back home. I think there's now this new wanting to move into balance between analog and digital. So there is, I think there's hope of coming back into a balance of analog and digital.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

That will be nice. Uh yes. And we were talking about the content assets. No, so I remember fin tank content assets, a lot of regulations, compliance, come, and I've had this model also working with fintechs. So uh, how do you like say this is a very typical, a strange problem for fintech companies in the B2B domain, not all B2B companies. So every word, every message, collateral has to go through a regulatory compliance, and uh even if others make a mistake that can be fixed, but fintech has cannot fix that so easily. So that is also something I want to understand more. Like how you handle that as a marketing team. So going through every piece of content. Is there anything else helping with something?

SPEAKER_01 21:22

I th one, I think it may be helpful because I had marketing and my name is Shalini. The head of legal is also Shalni. So I think by default, a lot of our emails cross paths with each other. Maybe we are looking at each other's content knowingly or not knowingly. But jokes aside, I think the fact is that it has to be a true partnership. And I think that's what we're trying to do. We tend to before and it's almost like checking in. Yes, when do we need that legal compliance to come in, or how do we think about compliance? Compliance for me is not just most people sometimes consider compliance to be a constraint. I consider it to be actually enabling me to do what's right over there. And so as a team, we actually think that way. So when we think about whether it is the content or whether it's a policy decode and things like that, we very much take into their input to guide us how we're thinking. So they're very much in the shape of everything that's there. And it is meant to be that way because typically we could also say products are being built without marketing being in the room, right? It's the same thing. You can build, you can go launch everything and without having compliance or legal in the room, you'll get the same problem. Because if we hold what's the insight to a customer and to the market, they similarly hold the insight to what will hold us true and and right. So that How we see it, it's a working mechanism. We build in a very strong working relationship to build this out. So I think that's how we see it. I know you mentioned AI. I think it's a it's not like trying to get an AI to test whether we're being compliant and things like that, but we do trust the functional expertise to let us know whether we're going in the right direction or not.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

And now when we talk about marketing, we talk about this uh ABM and all of that. I see companies on your size as big as uh MindLesh. People invest heavily on technology platforms, especially uh print platforms and automation platforms to successfully execute. But uh but still a lot of people lot of people struggle to convert the accounts to uh say late stage opportunities or uh revenues, right? So then in uh how do you think, you know, but uh what what what do you think companies should do, you know, when they're having invested so much on technology and then still struggling to convert that deal to effective late-stage opportunities or even to revenues?

SPEAKER_01 24:12

I mean, I I think you're every opportunity needs to be nurtured. Um I think that's the key part that we have to step back. And sometimes that opportunity may not be really ready. In fact, there's uh interesting research that I read on LinkedIn, the institute, the B2B Institute, which actually said 95 and 5. Only 5% of the people you're typically marketing to are in market to buy your product, and 95 aren't. So, what does that mean? Does that mean that you stop prioritizing or talking to them itself, right? So I think if you take that lens, I think it's a question of having constant conversation because they may not be ready today, but they'll be ready later. That doesn't answer the question you asked, but I think that first starts off with saying, how do you do the first step of awareness itself in the journey? So you always are trying to build interest. They may not be ready, but are you always giving them some pass to get into the fun to answer your question, right? I mean, so and it also goes back a little bit to what you earlier said, the just problem statement. If you've not identified that problem statement and they are not even aware of that problem statement that you can do, and you don't talk about it, it's they're not gonna be into that next stage, right? Because many times you may go ahead and say, let me take an example, right? Take the online payment gateway. You may want to say that we are the best gateway that we want. But I would say that perhaps the next thing to say is that how do I drive premiumization of your portfolio? Maybe it's asking what else we could offer them that will move them down the funnel than they're saying, hey, take me as another payment gateway, right? Or you could go back and say, okay, you have high speed, you know, during your spike things that are happening. How do you try and say how we can help you do those spike volumes that are happening? All of those things go back to what you were saying, which is to understand that can I make sure that I'm aware of their problem statements at each stage? Strategic stages. At each stage and different states that they may be, you know, they may be at different states. Today they're they're they're they're focusing on one problem, another day they're focusing on another problem, and third day they're focusing on that problem. It's the same company. How do you go back and keep identifying that, hey, if you're working on this, let's, you know, we've got something that we can help you do. And we've seen it work for someone else, and maybe it'll help you over there. That's what marketing needs to do. That storytelling of how we can help and enable has to happen. And that's when it starts moving through the stages, right? Because you can keep saying the same thing again and again and keep saying, oh, but I told you this already. Now you should have moved into stage two, and then you should have moved, and I've met you, and then you should have moved into stage three. That doesn't work in real life, it doesn't work, right? You have to you have to think like, what is it I constantly keep telling them or keep keeping them aware, and then suddenly declick, hey, why didn't I think of this? Why didn't I call them and talk about that? And that's when it becomes a later stage opportunity. Giving up doing the channel is difficult. Like somewhere I read, and this was interesting, it started helping it. They need to see it seven times till it registers. Right? And therefore, we need to start building that muscle. I'm not saying we are successful, they're at pine labs are doing it, but I think that's the muscle we're trying to build. That can I make sure that I am telling, talking to them seven times? Am I identifying what they're trying to do and then get back at this particular piece? I think that's what is interesting to try and see if we can get into moving them across. The other thing I feel as marketing, we tend to do sometimes is we don't take the end-to-end ownership. You know, at times we would say, okay, we've done this job, and by now this is our campaign. The brief was to do the campaign, we were supposed to launch it, and we've done that. I think very important it is to see the follow-through. So, for example, even if I do an event, if as a marketing team, I've not thought through what do I need to send to everyone who's attended the event two weeks from now, I don't think I've done my job as a marketing partner because my sales team can still only do one-to-one. Marketing has that capability of doing one to many. So helping them give that air cover is extremely important. Right. So I think that's where we need to do that thinking through that follow-through continues to happen, continuous conversation needs to happen. Identifying the different problem statements or solution statements, the triggers that we're talking about, become part of our language needs to happen. It's a lot we also need to prioritize. Sounds, you know, easy to say, very difficult to do, but I think we're trying to get into that path more with more with more intentionality itself.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Actually, this is I believe this is the best of this entire episode, whatever you just mentioned, because this is the most underrated thing in B2B. A lot of people don't take this so seriously. But what you have mentioned is the core. That's it all. You have to match the content testing with the buyer journey. And you cannot just keep on you know sending something when the buyer is not even ready or the awareness state, or you cannot send something when they are ready to buy, you know, something related to an awareness state without even realizing how far they are there and they're talking to other vendors. Very important thing that we just mentioned. And uh like and also this is something uh I just thought, you know, it just came up in my mind because uh right now in India a lot of these uh AI companies, and especially FinTech and AI, is like very fashionable and they get funding so easily, also, people get so funded so easy. And and you see every month uh some company or the other keep coming. And uh is there any advice you want to give for these companies that when you see they are making mistakes, nobody grows as big as Pine Lab so easily. I think they are somewhere falling behind some some stage, you know, they're all funded growing, but then at some stage everybody is falling down.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

I would I mean it would be presumptuous for me to know what they're doing and what they're not doing. I think it's a question of for me what holds true is understanding the early adopters. I think that for me and what really made that stake is extremely important. Like I love, love reading, not the not seeing the comments, uh sorry, not the likes, but seeing the comments. I love seeing NPS reports because for me that that customer insight or that feedback loop of the people who've early used it and found that magic is extremely important for me, right? This is not a pine libres example, but something that I'd looked at Google. My mo one of my most cherished elements of working was that I realized that our promotional campaign of getting advertisers didn't work for them because our campaigns took longer. So stepping back, we would say spend X get Y, right? So spend X get Y. Most based on the kind of, and this was irrespective of which category you belonged. It didn't matter whether you were a real estate advertiser or you were a you know a flower delivery advertiser, it was the same thing, or whether you were running a, you know, a tourism product or something like that. We realized that many of our customers, based on certain categories, would find success in certain if the campaign ran longer rather than immediate. Because when we're not a social platform, we're not we were not Meta or Instagram where you see and you immediately get some kind of an high with the likes and impressions, right? This is about generating intent-based leads. The biggest change we did was all and we realized that them for them to stay through that path, needed them to invest much more than what they currently were investing. But it isn't fair to ask a first-time advertiser that trust us and we'll be able to deliver it. We just had to say we are in it for you. So matching their investments and showing that if you invest this amount, we will match that same amount became a much more powerful thing. Because what did that do? That made sure that we understood that it would take longer for them to find results. And the way to keep them longer was to make sure that their budget did not impact them to see the results. That I would consider to be a better marketing tactic than to say I ran a campaign that had XYZ celebrity who kind of talked about how wonderful this product is, right? So, I mean, I think the the point I'm trying to make is sometimes we tend to scale with something that's more visible, right? And we're saying, oh, it's it we need to do XYZ because that's more jazzy, that's the most thing. And sometimes you may have to do it. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but sometimes there is foundational elements that will actually give you that lift that happens. And many founders tend to forget that because they tend to go by what they're seeing that we are set to.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Absolutely. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

TLDR version after a very long comment is I would say just step back and look at your early users and learn their pattern of what is, you know, why either their buying pattern or their product usage pattern, because that insight will hold you and inform your marketing way better than seeing what your competitor is doing and trying to copy that competitor.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

Again, also it is again the human judgment. You start the prototype for the pilot, see what works, what is not working, what can you do better, collectively take some decisions and then scale up. Correct. That's all it needs. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

I think uh there was a uh I mean uh slightly to that point, I think there was somebody, uh Kritika, I think, uh, who is the who is the one of the first few employees of uh Open AI, or I think and she kind of talked about this framework called date, you know. So she said diagnose, diagnose what the problem is, you know, and A is analyze what it is. But D, take a different approach. You know, so in a way, take a different approach because if everyone is doing this, maybe waterbone would be something else, and then E, experiment, right? And I think that's in a way, that's kind of helped me think through the same things of understand the foundation, but then also be open to experimenting and learning a little bit more to the point I made, but yeah, it's it's the thing that I find.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

That's absolutely right. Yes. So because of uh the next thing which I wanted to ask you was also about these enterprise deals, you know, which you we're talking a lot about that, and usually these deals usually is not because of like our a single marketing campaign or an ad. Usually it's a combination of marketing sales and all of that together. When so when sales is pursuing a strategic account, so what role after that, after you hand off to a sales, do you have any marketing role in that after it is those two sales?

SPEAKER_01 35:06

It's I mean it it is it is almost like a loop, right? One customer becoming successful can be used to get other customers. For us, that's that loop that starts happening. So if they're not successful, we don't tell their story, we don't take their learnings, we're not able, and we're not able to maximize that it becomes something of a lost opportunity. So for me, that's there. The second part I would say is the continued relationship, because everything is about, and that's something I look at, renewals or upsell rates that we're looking at. Because if we don't see how deep they are with all the products that we can possibly offer them, then we're leaving, I mean, money on the table, right? So it's not just about let's be clear, leaving it as, you know, looking at it only from a singular point of view. So I think that's the other thing that we need to start seeing that they've taken this, but why not? Why? Why not look at what the other things that we could get back to them and doing? So this was something that was interesting. And just recently we just did a customer testimonial with Amazon Pay, and it's fabulous. It's a 10-year working relationship with them, right? And in the 10 years that we've been doing, we've been every because of our constant work that the team has been doing, not us as marketing, but as the team that's been doing, we've learned how beautifully they've been able to leverage different custom-based integrations because simply because of the partnership. But now that partnership story needs to inspire other people to think that way, right? And so therefore, thinking about not just testimonial to talk about the work we've done, but also that same testimonial to kind of inspire other customers to think differently about their problem statements becomes important. So for me, marketing also needs to help in that partnership to grow. Also needs to make that partnership inspire. Um so I think that's the other thing I would say that we do need to think about.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

Yes, yes, absolutely. Coming back saying it's coming back with the feedback and then marketing taking the lessons and then back and forth, it works. Yes, absolutely. Now we're coming to the end of the show. I just want to ask you something uh about uh this enterprise D2D marketing and all. So if you had to based on your experience, so and the way AI and are taking things forward, uh totally unexpecting things are happening all over. So I I'm just trying to understand. If you had to bet on some shit that is uh likely to get done in the next 24 months, you think something the CMOs are not ready to take done? Is that anything that the CMOs need to be cautious of? Or you think uh let's take it nothing too well.

SPEAKER_01 37:39

I mean, I don't know what I don't know, right? So it's like I mean, it's a it's a little bit that way. But I think CMOs today are extremely wanting to get agile. I've seen that. I've seen that with my peers, I've seen that in the groups I've been with. Everyone is quite aware of how things are going to change, and therefore, are we ready for that change? So it's a mindset shift more than a capability shift itself, right? You've increasingly started seeing how Unilever today has said that I will move away from traditional advertising and only move to unit influencer-based advertising. Now, not everyone is making that shift. It's worked for them since they're making that shift that's happening. So trends are going to come. And I think most, so I think there are three things. There's technology that's going to change. When technology changes, consumers are going to change the way they behave, right? Clearly, most people are now starting to discover their products on LLMs than on maybe the traditional ways that they were searching. So are you present over there? How are you showing up over there? Those are basic things that are going to start happening. So technology is going to change the way customers and consumers find information. So therefore, are we learning that platform fast enough? And are we being nimble enough to take on that technology and learn what it is? I think it's a process. None of us will get it right the first time. So it's not just we're all many people maybe faster based on where their time and resources can be, but that's one that will happen. The second that's gonna happen when technology starts changing is the fact that trends will start coming. Some trends took five years to land, ten years to land, and now trends are happening in two weeks' time. Right? So those trends are happening so quick. So, can't do you have the agility to be on trend is gonna become whether you're a B2C company or whether you're a B2B company, you may have to decide which trend is important. Like, for example, we're sitting off your podcast. Podcasts that became a trend a couple of, you know, we don't know what's going to disrupt that podcast way of information. But right now, almost everybody wants to see a podcast because that's the best way of listening to the communication and understanding what people are thinking about, right? But two years back it wasn't as big, it's now become really big over there. So are we thinking through that capability? Or are we thinking that now that the should now everyone do a podcast? Could also be a question, right? Like, do you have what it takes? Now, and so that's the second part. So trends are happening so quickly. How will you spot that trends and how will you work on that trend? It's gonna happen. That's the second thing. The third thing is there are some universal truths that will stay that are timeless. So you have to know what will be that be so that you don't completely lose your compass itself. Because it's so easy to fall into these things that if you don't lose that compass, it becomes a problem on saying where do you want to focus and what you want to do. So there will always be elements of building trust, you know, whether it's a customer trust or a consumer trust. So, how are you building towards that? How do you build for the fact that you will be able to storytelling, whether it is uh on on an on-trend style or not, it will have to be authentic. Whether using AI generated or not, authentic storytelling will always be important, right? So there will be things that are timeless because at the end of it, we are people emotional. So you'll have to think about those things that will stay. So balancing this is something I think some CMOs will need to think about how they direct their teams to building that out.

unknown 41:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

So it's wonderful. I think even in-person events might also quick shift because you over these kind of podcasts and in-person events, you cannot bring AI in that much uh into it. It has to be a real human knowledge, you know. You cannot fake it through.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

You can have digital, but you can think about what's your first interaction, the second interaction, do you want it curated, do you want it small, do you want it large? Like those are the things that you typically would want to think through as experiences also.

SPEAKER_00 41:34

Thank you. Anna, we're coming to the end of the show. Thank you so much for coming down and challenging. This was a truly a pleasure topic today. And there is so much information for the listeners, and so much that uh we could all learn from there.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

Wish you the best and thank you so much. It's an amazing podcast to be on. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

Thank you.